Channel management strategy: balancing OTAs, direct bookings, and partnerships

Every point you give to Viator or GetYourGuide is a point you don’t keep. At 20–25% commission, a $200 rafting trip booked through an OTA puts roughly $150–160 in your pocket. The same trip booked directly through your own site costs you 1–8% in booking platform fees, netting you closer to $185–197. At 500 bookings a year, that gap is $12,500 to $25,000.

The math isn’t new. But the situation has gotten worse. In 2025, OTAs claimed 37% of all experiences bookings, up from 28% just two years earlier, according to Arival’s State of Experiences data. Meanwhile, direct bookings through operator websites dropped from 29% to 25% in the same period. Operators are losing ground to platforms that charge them to reach their own customers.

Channel management strategy is how you stop that slide. Not by abandoning OTAs, but by using them for what they’re good at while protecting your direct booking base and building out partnership channels that cost you less.

The real problem with treating OTAs as your primary channel

OTAs aren’t bad. Viator lists more than 300,000 experiences across 2,500 destinations. GetYourGuide reaches travelers in 14 languages across 10,000+ cities. These platforms put you in front of people who’ve never heard of you. That has real value, especially when you’re building brand recognition in a new market or filling shoulder-season gaps.

The problem is letting them become your default channel. When 60–70% of your bookings flow through OTAs, you’re building someone else’s business. You don’t own those customer relationships. You can’t email them next year. You can’t sell them add-ons at checkout. And when GetYourGuide decides to raise your commission rate (which they did for select operators in 2025, pushing some above 30%), you have no leverage.

The operators who get this right treat OTAs as one channel in a portfolio, not as a revenue strategy.

How to actually use OTAs without getting owned by them

The first move is selectivity. Not every OTA earns a slot in your channel mix. Viator drives volume, especially for travelers already in destination search mode on Google and TripAdvisor. GetYourGuide skews toward European travelers and independent explorers. Klook is the right call if your market includes Asia-Pacific visitors. Listing on five platforms at once without a channel manager to sync availability is how you end up with double-bookings, no margin, and a customer service problem you didn’t need.

Pick two to start. Connect them through a channel manager like Bókun, Rezdy, or Checkfront so inventory updates in real time. Then use availability rules deliberately.

Most OTA platforms let you set blackout dates, minimum lead times, and capacity limits. Use these. Block your highest-margin weekends during peak season on OTAs and keep that inventory for direct. Open OTA availability for slower midweek slots or shoulder months when you need to fill spots. A Colorado whitewater outfitter running full boats on Saturday and Sunday in July has no business paying Viator’s commission for those seats. Using the same OTA connection to fill a Wednesday trip in September? That makes sense.

Building direct bookings that actually stick

OTAs don’t just compete with your direct channel. They often feed it. Bókun’s platform data shows that 65% of direct bookings come from guests who first found the operator on an OTA. They discover you on Viator, then Google you, find your website, and book direct. That’s the pattern you want to accelerate.

It starts with having a direct booking experience that’s worth completing. Your booking page needs to load fast, work on a phone, and not require a call. Mobile traffic accounts for the majority of tour searches, and a clunky checkout loses the conversion even when the guest had their card out. We’ve covered the specifics in our booking flow optimization guide.

The second piece is giving people a reason to book directly. A 5–10% discount for direct booking is the most common approach, but it’s not the only one. Early access to popular departure times, exclusive add-ons (a guide photo package, a gear upgrade, a post-trip campfire), or bundled experiences that don’t exist on OTA platforms all create direct-only value without eroding your pricing on third-party channels.

Email capture is the longer play. When someone books through your site, you own that relationship. When they book through Viator, you don’t. Set up a post-booking sequence that collects contact info, delivers pre-trip value, and creates a reason to rebook directly next time. This is how operators who’ve reduced OTA dependence by 20–30 percentage points over a few years have done it. Not through one big move. By converting OTA customers to owned contacts, one trip at a time.

See our direct booking SEO playbook for the search side of this.

Partnerships: the channel most operators ignore

Hotel concierge desks, DMOs, vacation rental property managers, corporate event coordinators, wedding venues. These are all distribution channels that most outdoor operators barely touch.

A concierge partnership typically runs 10–15% commission. That’s meaningfully less than OTA rates, and the guests who arrive through a hotel concierge are already in destination, already willing to spend, and often repeat visitors to the area. We’ve seen this pattern repeatedly with guide services that get serious about local partnerships - a fly fishing operation in Jackson Hole with relationships at six lodge concierge desks is filling boats all summer with guests who’d have otherwise landed on Viator first.

The mechanics aren’t complicated: offer a commission structure, provide a booking link or a reseller code through your booking software, and make the concierge’s job easy. Don’t require them to call you. Don’t make them manage availability manually. Platforms like Rezdy have a reseller marketplace built in: you set your commission rate, partner properties get a unique link, and bookings and commissions track automatically.

Corporate and group bookings are another underused channel. A single corporate team-building booking might be 20–30 participants at full-price, with no OTA commission involved. Outreach to corporate event planners, HR departments at local employers, or team retreat coordinators takes more effort per lead than listing on an OTA, but the margin is dramatically better.

DMO partnerships (with your local visitors bureau, chamber of commerce, or state tourism office) often come at no commission cost. Getting listed on their official experience pages can drive meaningful organic traffic from travelers in the research phase.

The cost reality of OTA commissions over time

The true cost of OTA commissions compounds. If your average booking is $180 and you run 800 trips per year with 60% of bookings through OTAs at 22% commission, you’re paying roughly $19,000 annually just in OTA fees. Shift that to 40% OTA over three years, and you’ve recovered more than $15,000 per year to put into SEO, email, or direct booking infrastructure.

The math only works if the shift is real, meaning you’ve built the SEO, the content, and the direct booking infrastructure to capture that demand yourself. A rafting company that drops from 60% to 40% OTA dependence because they invested in organic search and email capture is genuinely ahead. One that just stops listing on OTAs without replacing that discovery channel loses revenue.

This is why the sequence matters. Build direct. Add partnerships. Then dial back OTA volume from the top, starting with your highest-demand inventory.

Channel manager tools worth knowing

Running multiple channels without software is untenable. You’ll find that out the first time you double-book a trip and have to call a family to cancel. A few options that outdoor operators actually use:

Bókun connects to most major OTAs and handles automated inventory sync, reseller management, and real-time availability. It charges around 1.5% per transaction, far less than OTA commissions.

Rezdy is strong on reseller networks and has a built-in marketplace for partnership bookings. Good for operators who want concierge and partnership channels alongside OTA connections.

Checkfront and Zaui both offer channel management alongside their booking platform features. If you’re already using one as your primary booking software, the OTA connectivity layer is worth enabling.

FareHarbor, which many operators already use as their booking engine, has built-out OTA connectivity and integrates with Viator and GetYourGuide. If you’re on FareHarbor, check whether your OTA connections are running through it or managed separately.

You don’t need all of these. You need one that connects to the two or three OTAs you’ve chosen, syncs inventory in real time, and lets you set rules. The comparison of booking platforms breaks down the major options.

What a balanced channel mix actually looks like

There’s no universal right answer, but a reasonable target for most independent outdoor operators is something like: 35–45% direct (website, email, phone), 30–40% OTA, 15–25% partnerships and other channels.

That’s not where most operators start. It’s where you’re trying to get to over two to three years. Operators who just launched benefit from OTA volume while they build organic presence and direct booking infrastructure. Operators who’ve been in business five or more years and are still 70% OTA-dependent are paying a permanent tax on their revenue that compounds every year.

The single most useful thing you can do this week: pull your booking data by channel and calculate what percentage of your bookings came through each source. If you don’t know that number, you can’t manage toward a better one. Most booking platforms have this report ready to run. Run it, then look at whether the channel mix is one you’d choose intentionally - or just the one you’ve drifted into.